Yesterday my coworker Eric asked me to build out some dynamic error pages for the upcoming version of one of our apps. He suggested a certain pattern that we used in a previous application. Being the adventurous soul that I am, I wanted to make sure his way was the best way. After some deep soul google searching, I found out that Eric’s method was considered best practice. It’s described in some detail on José Valim’s blog post, but I’ll break it down for you here:

First, we need a controller for our error pages. Start out with something simple, like this:

# app/controllers/errors_controller.rb
class ErrorsController < ApplicationController
  layout 'error' # only if you want a separate layout for your errors

  # 404 Not Found
  def not_found
  end

  # 422 Unprocessable Entity
  def unprocessable
  end

  # 500 Internal Server Error
  def internal_server
  end
end

Now let’s add some routes:

YourApp::Application.routes.draw do
  match '/404', to: 'errors#not_found'
  match '/422', to: 'errors#unprocessable'
  match '/500', to: 'errors#internal_server'
end

With Rails 3.2, error pages have been extracted to a Rack Middleware. Fortunately for us, so are the application routes. We can to tell rails to use our routes app for the error pages in config/application.rb:

# config/application.rb
module YourApp
  class Application < Rails::Application
    # ...

    config.exceptions_app = self.routes
  end
end

And that’s it! Add some page templates in app/views/errors/ and you should be good to go.

To test it, we need to turn off the development mode error pages. Set consider_all_requests_local to false in config/environments/development.rb:

# config/environments/development.rb
YourApp::Application.configure do
  # ...

  config.consider_all_requests_local = false

  # ...
 end

You’ll want to set that back to true before committing your code, or else you won’t receive any helpful feedback while developing your application.

All of the above steps were fairly simple, but figuring out how to determine which format to return is a little complex. env['REQUEST_PATH'] contains the error path (e.g. “/404”) and no format information is getting passed to the errors controller, so the standard Rails respond_to stuff is not going to work here. We can grab the original request path via env['ORIGINAL_FULLPATH']. I added a few private methods to errors controller to help out. The first two help me figure out what format the request came as. I want to return a JSON response if the request starts with ‘/api’ or ends in ‘.json’. The third will render our template in the format we want.

class ErrorsController
  private

  def api_request?
    env['ORIGINAL_FULLPATH'] =~ /^\/api/
  end

  def json_request?
    env['ORIGINAL_FULLPATH'] =~ /\.json$/
  end

  def render_error(error)
    if api_request? or json_request?
      render "#{error}.json.jbuilder"
    else
      render "#{error}.html.haml"
    end
  end
end

Now we just need to update the actions in our controller:

class ErrorsController
  def not_found
    render_error "not_found"
  end

  def unprocessable
    render_error "unprocessable"
  end

  def internal_server
    render_error "internal_server"
  end
end

And we’re done! Make sure you add your json templates to app/views/errors.

$ curl http://localhost:3000/api/v1/nothing-here
{ error: "not_found" }
$ curl http://localhost:3000/nothing-here.json
{ error: "not_found" }
$ curl http://localhost:3000/nothing-here
<h1>404 Not Found</h1>